Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain Author(s): Veena Das Reviewed work(s): Source: Daedalus, Vol.

125, No. 1, Social Suffering (Winter, 1996), pp. 67-91 Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20027354 . Accessed: 26/06/2012 17:10
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Veena

Das

Language and Body: Transactions of Pain Construction

in the

In

repeatedly against women

trying which

to

write

in Indian social

pain through become textual bodies me.1 nation One not men, of The moment

society, sciences

the meaning(s) I find that the could gaze is written

of

violence

of enormity of the birth of India also the scene war the earliest studies

this pain is not the violence as a nation of of

on which

of languages at, touch, or often elude

in question. The very free from colonial domi

was

known

a fratricidal women, of and the

collective violence. unprecedented this violence had stated that history of such dimensions: old "Decrepit young children, infants in arms

defenseless One

helpless

by the thousands were done to death byMuslim, Hindu and Sikh

fanatics."2 scale abduction hundred was of this violence the large signatures The earliest estimates rape of women. put the

figure of abducted women

to one stituent thousand. it was Hindu Assembly thousand thirty-three Muslims, men. while I have

from both sides of the border at close

in the Con debates legislative on December that stated, 15, 1949, or Sikh women had been abducted by Government had claimed that fifty In the

the Pakistan elsewhere

thousand Muslim women

had been abducted by Hindu

or Sikh

the discourses of the State on analyzed as well as the composition abducted women and their recovery of want to I reenter in accounts voice the personal women.3 this by scene of devastation been made and loss. to ask how one should inhabit such a world that has the desolating of strange through experience as Cavell describes Emersonian this the Stanley the world through a kind of mourning for it.4

violence gesture
Veena Das

of approaching
is Professor

of Sociology

at the University

of Delhi.

67

68

Veena Das
In the work

in many it is the transactions of mourning societies in the gendered between and body, of division especially language recreates of which the and silence labor, by language antiphony in the face of tragic loss. It is not that in turning to these the world transactions violence some of answers on to find direct to the questions I expect to reenter of meaning, the problem but I do want I have engaged the texts with which earlier to make the on two questions:5 is it that the imaging 1) How deeper and in India came to include as objects inscribed on which the appro the desire for

dialogue of the project of nationalism of women of bodies priation nationalism future made? creation could be 2) Did of the world

and a memory for the brutally in the re find a place forms of mourning in the discursive formations in, for instance, I am borrowing a metaphor from as a river that flows

India? post-Independence In forming these questions Cavell?the metaphor Stanley between river does the two not shores have

of philosophy and the everyday. of the metaphysical The more two to ask which is shores of these But the from distant as the present position shore on which of women, the bodies in which events

important one appears I write, brutal rape violence,

for its existence.6

of

and abduction on of nationalist scriptions slogans is never certain whether of One the distance sudden appearances. is the is an optical for there these images illusion, tempta always to cast away these narratives, tion, as in family and nationalist some to distant from the shore of everyday experience images did to ask what this brutalization horizon. Yet, one must At the very least and nation. of self, community, the experiences constitute the (perhaps metaphysical) thresh these scenes of violence

in and painful women of made

unseen

old within which

The loss second in the flow

the scenes of ordinary life are lived.

is the near of one, on which life makes the voices the experience of of women

shore

everyday In the genre of lamentation, in of mourning. the process "public" women their and through their bodies have control both through the for is articulated instance, body, by through language?grief hurt on oneself, of grievous the inner state,7 and is finally present Thus between the transactions body infliction articulation of the world in which the "objectifying" given a home and language of strangeness and making in language. lead to

an

the world

Transactions
revealed

in the Construction
can

of Pain
be transformed

69
of a

by its non-inhabitability, by death, one can dwell again, in which into a world call the power such healing simply see the two shores together

in full awareness to endure. within

life that has to be lived in loss. This is one path towards healing?
women And Was and a single frame. to take this image of healing and men it possible for women recreate died when the desire for nationalism and that which now we

into from colonial became metamorphosed autonomy subjugation violation?8 Could that which died be named, sexual acknowl one be condemned to dwell alone Or would edged, and mourned? and nameless realities in the need ruins of memory, as Lawrence before Langer calls them?9 Some the three the work sity to be fictionalized they can be appre

hended. This is apparent in the weight of the distinction between

in of the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary registers of the neces of Lacan, and in Castoriadis's formulation on of working of the for the the register imaginary

itself.10 I shall allow myself of society three conceptualization or a to that theoretical the scenes, phantasms, provide scaffolding In these three scenes I call upon the words issues I address. of the the poet-novelist-essayist and Wittgenstein, philosopher Tagore, the short sponded Tagore sounds story writer to the call of are Sadat Hasan the world as persons re who Manto, in the register of the imaginary. to me for they answered in the of devas of imagi In plac and not

important to the scenes of the Indian languages because he showed the tation; Wittgenstein possibilities a rigorous nation of pain within grammar. philosophical

and Manto and senses

I can simultaneously be there ing their texts within mine, be there. I hope I shall be evoking these texts not in the manner of a thief who has stolen another voice but in the manner of one who to the words herself of this other.11 pawns I

The first scene is fromWittgenstein's

on the question of how my pain may

The Blue and Brown Books

reside in another body:

In order to see that it is conceivable that one person should have one must in another examine what sorts of facts pain person's body, we call criteria for a pain being in a certain place... .Suppose I feel

70

Veena Das

a pain which on the evidence of the pain alone, e.g. with closed eyes, I should call a pain in my left hand. Someone asks me to touch the I do so and looking around spot with my right hand. painful hand_This be would perceive that I am touching my neighbor's pain felt in another's body.12

"I am in pain" the sentence bodies, move I out of an inex which may through and suffocation of my pain. This does not mean pressible privacy uses the route of a philosophi that I am understood. Wittgenstein to say that this is not an indicative cal grammar al statement, one. it have the formal It of is the may appearance though begin between becomes the conduit ning in this rendering, is not that game. Pain, or an communication that marks inexpressible something destroys a in language. exit from one's existence it makes claim Instead, be given or denied. In for acknowledgment, which may asking of language either to an What case, inner it is not object. for me is that a referential statement that is simply pointing a

In this movement

in drawing the scene of the as the bodying creates of pain, Wittgenstein forth language pathos to out is my pain?in Where of words. the you point touching it is?found location of that pain?has my pointing finger?there (our pain) can inhabit, at least for that your body, which my pain is fascinating moment when I close my eyes and language inexpressibility then my need for its plenitude, ment that human beings have with that for the if the touch your hand? And is always of pain short of falling is this not the sense of disappoint

themselves and the language is given to them? But also, does the whole task of becoming a re even not involve of human, human, becoming perversely sense to of if is the loss when this (even sponse language rage)

seems to fail?Wittgenstein's
seems to me

example of my pain inhabiting your

to suggest that the repre either the institution body in imagination but is not experi sentation of shared pain exists case one would in which is hooked rather say that language enced, to that the world of the expe pain. Or, alternately, inadequately rience pain mar of the possibility of pain cries out for this response in your body and that the philosophical could reside to that call. is an answer of pain that my gram

Transactions

in the Construction II

of Pain

71

The

second

scene

is from Rabindranath

the investment in three Here

of sexuality

important to simply draw Iwant (Home and the World)?a movement that has itself self

of Tagore. A pr?figuration into the project of nationalism is found Ghore Baire, and Char Adhyaya. novels?Gora, out certain novel that the British from Ghore passages is set in the context The Baire of the

Swadeshi the that of reads

against frozen become

as if it were

the images of both nation of such magnified ing it is the pursuit concreteness blind towards the unique of suffering. experience The story of Ghore Baire to relate the story through is well

Raj. struggle in language. It is this frozen self a script. It produces a magnification and sexuality, and in Tagore's read one images that can make to the of being and hence The narrative device is

is to free

known.

interspersed

accounts

of the three main

characters: Nikhil, the local zamindar who is bound to his praja (subjects who include both Hindus and Muslims) by ties of pa
tronage fiery and love; his wife Bimala whose I shall desire moves from Nikhil some root

to Sandip and then returns to Nikhil;

nationalist from metaphors Bimala When revolutionary. each character.

and his friend Sandip, the

reproduce only

inspired by Sandip's passionate speech in favor of the Swadeshi which she has heard with other women from behind movement, the curtains, Bimala to serve food tells her husband that she wishes to Sandip with her own hands the mediation of (i.e., not through a servant). a woman a man to can a food be Serving very by sensuous between the maternal and the sexual in gesture, hovering is the first time Bimala will enter any male imagery. This Bengali that of her husband, to convention, for according except of the feudal household do not step outside the women's

presence women
arena.

has not God made me day I felt?why as this let the unbelievably great day dawns, beautiful-Today men of the nation see in its women?the form of the goddess (the one who holds the earth)_Will Jagaddhatri Sandip be able to see that awakened power of the country inme? Or will he think that

I shall speak the truth. That

72
house?

Veena Das
I am an ordinary woman, merely the wife who lives in his friend's

Sandip
of her image in Sandip's de eyes that Bimala magnification an I sires will find chord. But before describe that, it is answering to constructs himself. The ask how line, important Sandip opening is enlightening: the reader first hears the voice of Sandip, when The When I reflect, is that Sandip? Am I simply I read my own account, in language? Am I just a book constructed of flesh and

constructed

blood? And then responding to the desire for the magnification

of Bimala however, that would which merge image is read as a need?Sandip with the

of the

image a desire,

of the nation? continues:

Unless they can behold the nation with their own eyes, our people will will not awaken. The nation needs the icon of a goddess_It not do if we construct the icon. It is the icons that have been into the transmitted by tradition that will have to be transformed in our is deeply transcribed icons of our nation. The path of worship country?traversing
stream towards the

that path we
nation.

shall have

to direct

the devotional

I I saw Bimala, I said that god(dess) for whose worship When thousand have come to the earth after a hundred yugas, till s (he) in her with revealed her form to me, till then could I have believed all my body and soul? If I had not been able to behold you, then I could not have seen the whole country as one, this I have told you this. It is very difficult many times. I do not know if you understand to explain that the gods in their heaven remain invisible, only in the world And of death do they show speech themselves. story:

as reported

in Bimala's

the whole Sandip got up and said, man reaches such a state when in your comes to be concentrated in one small place.13 Here world see salon I have seen my world revealed-1 you-After worship matram Not mantra vande has formula) you my (sacred changed. ing the but vande priyam the nation as mother) (Iworship (Iworship the nation as the nation as beloved), vande mohinim (I worship protects us.. .the beloved destroys us. enticing one). The mother Beautiful is that destruction. You hear the tinkling of the bells of

Transactions
that dance cooled

in the Construction

of Pain

73

of death. This delicate, luminous, fruit bearing, the one mountains14?this earth of Bengal?you have the Malay by its in of in the the eyes altered fraction of a your devotee image an in second [lit. the blinking of (the enticing eye]. You, oh Mohini to took to entice the demons one, a female form that god Vishnu come with your vessel of poison?I have shall drink poison)?you either die after drinking this poison or shall become the one who has conquered death.

Nikhil
In an argument with Sandip: to serve my country but not to worship I am willing it. To offer to else that which be is should anyone except worship worshipped to destroy it. In an argument with Sandip in Sandip's voice): speech on the nation as an icon (as reported

But all this is very difficult to explain to Nikhil. Truth is now like a prejudice in his mind. As if there is a special substance called truth. I have said to him often that where falsity is truth there falsehood alone is truth. That falsehood shall be superior to truth. Those who can think of the icon of the nation as a truth, that icon will do the work of truth. We as a people cannot visualize the idea of a nation can see the icon as the nation easily. When all this to accomplish known then those who want the project of will have to work with this understanding. nationalism, Nikhil suddenly got very agitated and said, you have lost the power to serve the truth, therefore you want a sacred formula to for hundreds of years the drop from the skies. This is why when work of the nation has remained undone, you now want to make the nation into a god so that you can stretch your palms in suppli cation and receive a blessing as if by magic. with is well ease but we

And finally in accepting his defeat in that his wife

Bimala Sandip, saw him but as a diminished to accept human refusing

and beloved

to in comparison being as this the extinguishing of the self:

I shall have to Today I am greedy. outside. woman created by the perfect) as my mental

see myself and Bimala completely from the to enjoy that Tilottama I wanted (a mythic gods so that every particle of her being was creation. The Bimala who had an external

74

Veena Das
existence

had become a pretext for that. But Bimala iswhat she is? not is no reason for me?there she does have to become Tilottama for that. am just a contingency in I have understood this clearly?I Today Bimala's whole life. That person with whom Bimala's being can that person is Sandip. But itwould be a great lie if Iwere to merge, was not simply a I am nothing for my manhood say that it means means An to capture the women of the interior.

Interlude that run through these for a tentative found their destruction three voices may weaving in Bimala, be brought Each of together. but in differ

The movements together the two men

at this moment have

ent ways. Sandip began his account by voicing no a existence who had just script?someone In the only moment comes when Bimala passionate speeches appropriate confirmed plea written one

the idea that he was

of language. outside to him, which of authenticity that is permitted to a has turned away from him, she responds have you got several Babu, "Sandip by saying an in your exercise book?so you can produce for each occasion?" Sandip's own fear

is finally in in Bimala's exists only in the reflection speech?he over a an or not veil inner life draw His do words falsify language. to hide the fact that there is no are indeed functioning it?they is a search for an icon, inner life to hide. His search for the nation a the of image in which his desire for the other is for magnification

lack of individual self may

desire. idea of revealed I would certain have kinds been of

be hidden by a collectivization
to draw an analogy with identities whose no

of
the are

in a mirror

Rabindranath compares
absence.

But reflection. by a in voice of the who schoolmaster, appears himself, an him to the new moon (amavasyar chand)?simply dissolve worshipped of violence and a magnified becomes the nation in the abstract, it becomes possible on all those who resist this or who

ghosts the fact

tempted in folklore, that they cast

As

distinctions of beloved all kinds counter

image to inflict create lows

the nation

an through for violence

for icons al The desire enlarged. equally images, as an absent object to be made magically visible The in this magnified investment sexuality. potential a in this construction. The story ends with is written

Transactions
communal carnage that the

in the Construction
reader does not gaze

of Pain

75

that is happening the immediate outside as the double of the nationalist ideology seem to have won Nikhil since Bimala may in their last exchange of intimacies, Bimala

at directly but as itwere, frame, waiting that has been propounded. returns falls to him. feet But and on his

begs him to let her worship him. Is this traditional slippage be tween husband and god not what he has tried to resist in their
relationship disastrous all it is not as much along? identification Iwho all this try to stop her from "Who am I to stop her?after any more: am the recipient of this worship." Nikhil's defeat in tradition that the everyday life embodied lives He does not

is the realization transformations

as god) as the new in the worship of icons (the husband is trying to bring that Sandip (nation as god). We see Nikhil us from into the heart of the carnage, away riding himself either as a sacrificial victim or as a martyr offering (but as such)?the of the image very magnification being named of nation and the investment of sexual desire in it has made it into a monster. as We the voice of the schoolteacher tells only know, is being us, that it will not do for him not to go there, for what done to the women is unspeakable. Towards the end he is brought a in The news, has back, says the person who injured, carriage. never

rescued him, is not good. We do not know if he will live or die. Tagore does not permit himself a closure. Nikhil is the truth seeker who can find comfort neither in the psychological clich?s of
tradition sees (husband the potential women and permits is god), of violence nor of modernity in both. Tradition (nation iswhat is god). He diminishes

a subtle to be perpetrated violence everyday once them. when comments Bimala that women's upon Thus, hearts are ungenerous, small, Nikhil replies, "yes, like the feet of women Chinese to grow." that are tied and never allowed In the a nation of building the image is not diminished, means Its are dramatization that bodies of women enlarged. for the cause as nationalism violently appropriated gives birth to its double?communalism. so that the nation If one deified women project but

modern

could be imagined as the beloved, the other makes visible the dark side of this project by making the bodies of women the surfaces on
which Body collective their and text of the nation both is written.15 here as simulacrums Nikhil, the truth in which seeker, death meet. language desire and collective function

76
prefigures unheroic

Veena Das
the

in an offer himself who must image of the martyr so of and that the magnified demons mode images gods a chance to be humanized I is think this the task have again. nature sets of this the unfinished his reader?to hear story, Tagore and modernity. of tradition of the projects the transformations Ill The The third phantasm I want to evoke is from a story by Sadat never take

Hassan Manto
gaze a journey

entitled "Khol Do," which I first analyzed in 1986.16

is the Partition of India and the riots, though we setting at the violence directly. An aged father and his daughter from one side of the border cannot to the other. On the father

destination,

comes for her. He searching to help trace lost relatives. He tells them about acting as volunteers to help. and urges them to find her. They promise his daughter

reaching his He goes berserk find his daughter. are across some young men who

The young men find Sakina, the daughter, hiding in a forest half crazed with fear. They reassure her by telling her how they had met her father. She climbs into the jeepwith them. One of them,
seeing duppata
breasts.

how

embarrassed gives her A

she his near

(veil), next

is because so jacket dead body

she that

does she

not can

have cover

her her

We

see a clinic. The

father, recognizes Sarajjudin, to the doctor's cham he follows the stretcher Numbly daughter. to to the stifling heat in the room, the doctor ber. Reacting points and says "khol do" the window it"). ("open towards in the dead body. The hands move is a movement There the tape of the salwar ter is alive." The doctor (trouser) and fumble to unloosen (lit. open)

stretcher.

on a is being brought It is his the corpse.

it.Old Sarajjudin shouts in joy "my daughter is alive?my

is drenched in sweat.

daugh

As I understood

this story in 1986,1

saw Sakina condemned to

as a living death. The normality has been destroyed, of language command. can hear words "other" the Sakina conveying only to language for has been documented relation Such a fractured it is the ordinari for whom of prolonged survivors violence, many ness of language them from the rest of the world. that divides the non-world father cannot noted that even Sakina's comprehend I

Transactions
into which she has been the body as a sign of the doctor death. Only can On register

in the Construction
for he mistakes in truth

of Pain
the movement

77
in

plunged, life whereas

as the off-the-center

it is the sign of her living in the story character

the true horror.

I think there is one last movement that I deeper meditation, not then comprehend. In giving the shout of joy and saying is alive," the father does not speak here in person "my daughter context In the societal of this period, alized voices of tradition. and honor the literary when ideas of purity populated densely did narratives, as well as family and political narratives, so that fathers

willed their daughters to die for family honor rather than livewith bodies that had been violated by other men, this father wills his
daughter proclaim In the to live even her brutal as parts violation. of her body can do nothing else but

terms set by the example from The Blue and Brown one may ask if the pain of the female body so violated can Books, a transaction live in a male body. One can read inManto between

death and life, body and speech, in the figures of the daughter and
at least, the daughter is speech of the father, an in existence she find his may utterance, alive, though only a home his utterance he creates and for her mutilated through of accounts self. Compare this with violated hundreds purporting the father. and In the inwhich the archetypal motif was experience to her her home after been way parents' finding having are to and and rape you told, subjected plunder, being "why if you were here?it would have been better dead." As I have to be based of a girl as often such rejections may not have occurred argued elsewhere, as they were to in But have narratives. the alleged happened in such of belief narrative truths the daugh widespread sacrificing ter to maintain the unsullied purity and honor of the family attests around without and to the power was of this myth. To be masculine when death was all to be able to hand death to your violated daughter obliterate for the concreteness any desire flinching?to of this human In the background once played being who of such stories, a single in your sentence on direct

uniqueness yard.17

family father.

of joy uttered by old Sarajjudin transforms themeaning of being a

In Tagore's reading as a linguistic himself of Sandip, he was of constituting capable InManto, clich?. the sentence, "my daugh

78

Veena Das
it has Although it is to beseech

ter is alive," is like Wittgenstein's, "I am in pain." the formal appearance of an indicative statement,

the daughter to find a way to live in the speech of the father. And
not at the moment it happens when her dishonor is hidden from the eyes of the world but at the moment when her body proclaims sentence not its end. is the beginning it. This of a relationship, At ment. labor create this moment I have written in the work I want to present elsewhere that the glimpse of a later argu in the gendered division of to ritually it is the task of men

of mourning, a body for the dead person and to find a place in the cosmos a very difficult one for the is always for the dead. This task, which as even become of the when members mourner, may repulsive, Aghori when state that in the cases live on cremation sect, who grounds, or violent someone has died an unnatural death, they have so as to to consume free the dead person parts of the dead body

from living the fate of a homeless ghost. I wonder

performed ship with away as healing from the terrifying the daughter whom dead. And socially that assume that this task accepting other fathers instead of the a trauma with of the may have

if Sarajjudin
relation simply cast

tortured

reliving lost object and reinvesting as a kind of relationship of healing

images of simplified or decathecting desire we need to think it elsewhere, death.

IV Nadia of used the idea of the ethics has recently Serematakis to describe rituals. She the structure of Greek mourning antiphony and corpo between shows how the interaction acoustic, linguistic, real orientations distinguishes embodied pearance' connotes women definition gives a public a it from "bad death": to a "good death" and "The acoustics of death

or 'ap and the presence in 'screaming' and lamenting construct The silent kin the death.' of 'good {fanerosi)

death is the asocial 'bad death' without

the absence to "witness" of witness."18 death and Thus, to convert

kin support. Silence here

it is the silence role of special into speech.19 In seen as is always

the rendering of this death. What physical women death? have The been classic

issue by Serematakis, death to the work of mourning when happens a to social and condemned abducted, raped, solution in this case is for the

ritualistic

social

Transactions
is objectified mourning breaking and made

in the Construction

of Pain

79

body to cut itself completely off from the polluted individual. This
the performance of symbolic as the for the "dead" person, devices by such ritualistic to stand for the person who of a pot that comes has present by to accept construing of the

socially died but is physically alive. This is the sentiment underly

I described earlier of kinsmen ing the stories refusing women or violated; or of men had been abducted who

their kinship obligations

sister other or wife rather than

in terms of the obligation to kill a beloved

let her fall into the hands of men

Such women who were violated and rejected community. a zone to two be be said between rather may deaths, occupying than between life and death. Let us take a step backwards towards in everyday life as it occurs in the case of "normal" mourning deaths not and ask whether seem an easy matter itwas to possible transform to deploy these the cultural "bad deaths" codes into

to represent the kind of social death that I have described. It does

"good In an women tives, deaths." earlier

I described the division of labor between paper, mourners and men, between and close rela professional in giving structure to the work kin and affines and between

of mourning

in Punjabi families.20 It is through the ritual work

mourners of the performed by the professional (usually women caste Barber who have very specialized roles in the death rituals) can glean in the form of a portrait. We that grief was objectified accounts women from descriptions in several that would given form bodies. a circle around the dead the time beating their breasts tear at their clothes In the frenzy of this "grief" they would and their hair, improvising various mourning laments to make the loss that has occurred and utterable. would public give the They to the women lead in the mourning laments who were closely related the dead to the dead loss has meant in circular body and move and inflicting injuries upon forms, all their own

articulate what the person. The laments would now bereaved. for each person, to The address was to own to as as the living, and their well person, bodies,

to the gods. I give a brief example of each kind of address:

(To the dead (mere lal)?you your eyes just once my beloved son)?Open jewel have never stalled any request Imade of you.

80

Veena Das
(To the men who are going the cremation ground)?Do to take the dead body of her husband to not let the fire touch him?I fold my could never bear the heat. of stone that you do not break

hands

before

you?he

you made (To one's own body)?Are when you see this calamity? (To the family

is a referring to the fact that the goddess goddess, call yourself of a dead son)?You is by the mother virgin?address were just jealous of the good fortune of my bahu? a goddess?you because you have your had to make her a widow son's wife?you are a call yourself a goddess?you self never found a husband?you
demoness.

I could how women

give

than callous, mortals. They rather within,

on in the laments, of blasphemy examples are rather the that idea rage against just beings, gods of the happiness small-minded play with beings who extensive

to bear pain that have their bodies rage against in the face of such tragedy. But than just disintegrate soon also have a dialogical laments since the mourning element, to get on with this by the counsel other women begin to punctuate to the most affected of living and by assurances the work deeply

mourners

iswith them. It is not that the support of the community as seen the represen that shall pass. Indeed, that grief is something as bodily is that it is metonymically tation of grief experienced as one this will that female and the carry pain within body pain forever. A mimesis rather is certainly established individual between body and lan

guage but it is through the work

than at the level of

of the collectivity

that this

A mourn symptom. happens bears Danforth recorded rural Greece from lament by Loring ing as in families:21 same laments the mourning the Punjabi grammar My child, where can I put the ponos I feel for you? If I toss it by the road side, those who pass will take it. If I throw it in a tree, the little birds will take it. Iwill take it in my heart so that it will take root there Iwalk. So that itwill cause me ponos while me as I stand. So that it will kill So, in a sense, both as surface witness it is the objectification as well and as depth, has inflicted. of grief on the body as in language, that According taken bears

to the loss that death

to Serematakis,

Transactions
it is this witnessing even convert a bad

in the Construction

of Pain

81

that can make death

and

into

the performance of death public own a good In my death. complicated and one, and I

experience, the question of how good death and bad death is to be

defined shall The contrast dominate but of by the act of witnessing return to it later. excess of of speech harm on is a more

infliction

in the mourning laments the body by the women of men. In the course

the theatrical in stark life men

stands

to the behavior

in terms of the public domain in the case of death they become mute.

of everyday over the control While

speech, is in the corpse cling to It is the

the house, all the preparations,

the dead the corpse

including the bathing and dressing

are performed Women body, by the women. not to the dead leave them. person imploring

men who have to disengage the dead body from the weeping
wailing ghats, gather

and

to carry it on their shoulders to the cremation women, It is they who and to give the sacred fire to the dead person. on the fourth the bones the ritual of day and perform a period between from ranging the living and

these into the sacred river. For immersing ten to thirteen days, the dead person hovers

the dead in the form of a ghost, and it is through the gift of a body ritually created for him or her by the chief mourner (usually the
husband or son) that the ghost finally becomes an ancestor. Thus,

ifwomen perform the task of bearing witness to the grief and the loss that death has inflicted (otherwise people will saywas it a dog
or cat that died, one woman it is men who must told me), ritually so that the dead can find a home.22 create all the conditions

But if the good death is defined by the bearing of witness on the

part so that grief can move between the body and can as as that be well the articulated, speech publicly performance of rituals for the dead so that they do not have to wander in the In a sense, every death, except that of a very old person, intro of women

world of the living as ghosts, how is bad death to be represented? duces disorder in personal and social life. But in the flow of everyday life this is understood to be caused by events beyond the
control one of the the living community. Indeed, underlying of mourning rituals is to absolve the living of responsibil A common refrain in mourning ity for the death that has occurred. cause of the death is to say that the ostensible laments (for instance a particular to is the for death do its ap disease) pretext only of tensions

82
pointed willful

Veena Das
death is seen to be caused prevails through a great tension come to prevail by the as to what the control

job. Of course, when action of others, then of the situation will definition of mourning laments.

All

this is reversed when

the normal flow of life is seen as

In that case women of men. bear witness by the violence disrupted a new to this disorder construction of speech and silence. A by a mourning woman to me recalled lament that witnessed the

defeat of the Sikhs at the hands of the British troops in the Anglo Sikh wars:
of the young wives? of the mothers? flowing laps The swagger of sisters protected by brothers? a out moment? in Wiped Oh, from seven seas across came the white man The The She went in war. on to say that although had died everything sons, was crowns on the heads

to fight. out it was But were in

wiped

possible for thewomen

The men

to wail since their men had died heroically

as husbands, such known and brothers. on women

the case of all that died in the Partition, there was nothing but
inflicted the men who silence?for not only strange men but also men to an elaboration of this statement It is an amplification that an me to for get possible women themselves. I have exegesis violence and deeply loved.23 It is is devoted. that the next section was never it constructed?for of such statements from the

In the literary imagination in India, the violence of the Partition

was in a manner of women desire on the bodies inscribing in In the mythic that we have not yet understood. imagination on war was or the in inscribed defeat India, victory ultimately about of women. of laments (mourning vilap or of Mandodari in the Ramayana, in the Mahabharata are literary classics. kin were slain in the epic battles) The the death of the role of witnessing was in of the Partition unique the idea of appropriating texts on

bodies Gandhari all whose This

transformation is a metaphoric the violence in everyday life. Yet, it achieved

the metamorphosis

between

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a territory territory. as nation As we saw and

in the Construction

of Pain

83
as in

the body of the women appropriating a pr?figuration of this is found earlier,

of the idea of the magnification of the image of Tagore's rendering sexu its draws the which from of nation, energy image magnified this image of sexuality and its intimate connection ality. However, with Indian the The the project imagination, representation image of the of nationalism but itwas not only a genealogy in the an important narrative trope in of the violation of the project of the Empire. innocent white woman who was brutally raped has also

narrative sepoys was an important trope for estab by the barbaric the barbaric in character of the natives the first 1857, when lishing rebellion the British took place. against large-scale Jenny Sharpe has analyzed the image of helpless women and children being cut as to pieces the "truth" of the sepoys by leering establishing en As she says, "Commissioners and magistrates "mutiny."24 trusted with systematic else. The tional investigating rape, mutilation reports, already had the and rumors torture could find no evidence of at Cawnpore came too late, Rebels or anyplace as the sensa were seen as

official

stories

however, done their work.

sadistic fiends, and Nana

crime unforgivable hibits a predictable she writes the massacre that

Sahib was

especially vilified for the

of desecrating

understanding 'one of the most

Barr ex English womanhood. massacre of the Cawnpore when revered of Victorian institutions,

the English lady,was slaughtered, defiled and brought low.'When

as the destruction is reported of an insti that the sacred image of English womanhood has tution, we know outlived the story of women's lives."25 of two strands. Thus, we have the interweaving First, the idea women must to death, which that bear witness in the is found classical into of Indian literature that and the notion the woman's the everyday body must life, gets be made transformed to bear the of women

strand seems to signs by the enemy. The second come at the time of the mutiny trope established that equates the violation of the nation with the violation of its women. It is not clear whether riots the nationalist during slogans were on women, the most horrific physically imprinted although are stories about such violations believed.26 What is commonly clear is that at least one hundred thousand women from both sides of the border were abducted and raped. The figures given forcibly

its possession from a narrative

84

Veena Das
Assembly de

in the Legislative the Constituent Assembly during in 1949 bates confirm this. It also affirmed that women paniment Family women stripped in cities jeering crowds on men who narratives abound of to save their honor. Such women to their new in these who lives who were naked were organized like Amritsar were were

of processions with the accom and Lahore.27

sacrificial families

to kill their compelled are beatified deaths in recovered from their to the occur converted

while family narratives, abductors and returned other hardly religion ever find and made a place literary bodies

or who

in the homes narratives,

of their abductors although they

frequently women's When disorder we find of

in the

the Partition

representations. were made the passive witnesses in this manner, how did women

of

the

mourn

the loss of self and theworld? It is in considering this question that

in the transactions reversals between startling body and In the of normal harm is process grievous mourning, language. women on own their while the acoustic inflicted and bodies, by codes make the loss public laments. by the mourning linguistic asking women a zone of to narrate silence their around of experiences the event. This the Partition silence was

When I found

that was general either by the use of language achieved and meta so as to but that evaded of any events phoric specific description or of the the their capture experience, by describing particularity events but the actual of abduction leaving experience surrounding rape unstated. in such Partition covered woman warned with would white and It was terms shrouds common as rivers right to describe of blood unto of the violence and of the the earth a flowing the horizon. but

Sometimes as one woman

images fleeing, were to remember. it was dangerous These memories me, to poison that makes the inside of the woman sometimes compared say that she is like of past relation of losses. At any rate, the self that had become emphasized the need to

remember

dissolve, as a solid is dissolved in a powerful liquid (andar hi andar

rahi h ai). At other times a woman would ghulja a discarded in which exercise book the accounts body, ships were kept?the none of the metaphors used of poisonous the repository give expression This code of back to their to this hidden silence a parchment to describe knowledge

families

knowledge. women who had been brought protected the efforts of the military evacuation through

Transactions
authorities after

in the Construction
from

of Pain
of

85
their

abductors, since the violation ship and affinity Rather than bearing witness public. to, the metaphor subjected and keeping the poison drinking been

recovered they were or who had been married

the homes

norms of kin by stretching of their bodies was never made to the disorder

that they had was of a woman that they used itwithin her: "Just as a woman's

body ismade
within And

so that she can hide the faults of her husband deep

the stance of silence." all pain?take and Kamla Bhasin told Ritu Menon (cited

her, as one woman

so she can drink

is always used?" Or, as was is a woman?she told "what earlier), to me, in a woman's is there to be proud "what body?everyday it is polluted The sliding of the representa by being consumed."

tions of the female body between everyday life into the body that
had events become of the into container their of the Partition perhaps the poisonous helped women of the knowledge to assimilate their is reversed the surface in the and

experiences Just as the relation act of witnessing depth of the body.

lives. everyday between speech and silence so is the between relation here,

In the fantasy of men, the inscription of nation to alist slogans on the bodies of women live India, Long (Victory or of their bodies (This thing, Pakistan), possession proclaiming a future memory create mal?is ours), would by loot?ye never be able to forget which men of the other community would as territory that the women had already been claimed and occu men. women were on The of other bodies the surfaces pied by this which texts were to be written and read?icons into of the new nations. But women agency by using meta a it home of pain, giving just as a child phors pregnancy?hiding in the woman's is given a home Kriesteva's of body. description but I am not there?may also be used to pregnancy?it happens act of remembering But the subsequent describe such violence. converted this passivity only through place being is that unlike difference offer allowed to the husband, to be born. from the body makes the surface own experience the woman's dis to the depth of the body. The only the child, which the woman will be able to

this holding of the pain inside must never be movement to depth from surface also into transforms agency. passivity It was again Sadat Hasan Manto who was able to give literary This to this. In his story Fundanen (Pompoms), a woman is

expression

86

Veena Das
of a mirror. strings its phonetic of Her is completely speech nonsense in rhymes used are like theatrical properties between with incoherent, or musical or musical

in front sitting but like many compositions,

representations. Interspersed sentences lables are meaningful the bus number other. The

the strings of nonsense syl information such as precise side of the border on her to the designs body, a says she is designing in for those days, she says, was one and the normal the fruits and of violence of the distortion

registering that body women within had the second seems

that brought her from one woman is drawing grotesque in the mirror. these only She

is appropriate for the time, to grow two stomachs?one was for them The to be able distortion sense. of

to bear speech

themselves.

body be a kind of

images cies?the

to make The language of pain could only deep a carnival of hysteria?the surface of the body becomes and the depth becomes the site for hysterical pregnan excess of hysteria all the phonetic that having language When Bimala said that Tagore's see the power in her, of the nation women one could in whom Manto's she she

destroys wondered seems

apparent meanings. if Sandip could to have

see prefigured of that project of making the nation visible the completion by a of surrealist images. juxtaposition as autonomous from colonial So, if men emerged subjugation citizens neously to be given a place in the for these wandering ghosts performed cosmos? We have to again turn to the register of the imaginary. this in his story "The City of Sorrow," Intizar Hussain described in which opens dead." manner died. to when wife with a conversation. The story three nameless men are having to "I have the first man say. I am saying, nothing a on the moves in form the then of The story dialogue asks how the point alive. Then perhaps to strip his old man another he was himself Then, when he actually of his sword independent as monsters. What of an then nation, kind of death simulta they emerged rituals could have been

of his dying. One of his companions on he forced a man Did he die when his saw sister the No, same man forcing alive. he remained naked? he

strip he

remained

forced

No, too he remained to strip his own sister naked? Then alive. Itwas only when his father gazed at his face and died that he heard are it is you who in his wife's voice the question, "don't you know

naked?

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dead?"

in the Construction

of Pain

87

to and he realized that he had died. But he was condemned own went. him with wherever he his carry corpse to me that just as women It appears drank the pain so that life men so an could for unheroic continue, longed martyrdom by invite which could the evil back themselves and human upon they ize the enormous and sexuality. But it images of nation looming was not through the political discourse that this was achieved. The debates women in the Constituent were full of the Assembly of imagery been back on the issue national from and of abducted honor Mahatma the exchange to return by side restoring abducted to of women

the women who had recovering and returning "their" women Gandhi, writing about

the other

the Muslims.

the exchange

of prisoners on the same page of his Delhi diary, said that it had
pained him the Muslim tance. who both women. to learn that many Hindu men were reluctant so as a form He urged them to do Nehru and entire assumed would and urged to not Hindu punish of men of repen to accept the women them for the sins of their of women had claimed as events It was from back if you behind.

Jawaharlal were recovered In this it was

abductors. sides, its women, could wipe

discourse have

that once leave

exchange the nation restored.

its honor

been

the slate clean

the horrendous

VI the register of the imaginary that the question of what could constitute the passion of those who this occupied unspeak zone was given shape. The zone between able and unhearable the two deaths that been speech, that had claim main for what to occupy did not permit of any could be spoken against the wrong "right" words done them. Hence, Manto's Sakina can only pro had repetition?mur in the corpse). de The the women It was on

the terrible kuch

truth of this society by a mute hui (there was a movement jumbish for the men Hence was to hear the

to mold this silence, it of the father that his cry joyful daughter was alive. This being alive in the zone of the two deaths, and this witnessing of the truth of the women's is how violation, in this zone could be defined. Here the issue is not that mourning

task of mourning by their presence.

of an Antigone, mourning
law of Creon, proclaiming

for her dead brother in defiance of the

that the register of someone who has

88
been

Veena Das
named must be preserved, as Lacan famous makes us witness that it in his not of Antigone's

interpretation

passage

she would

have died for a husband or a child but that this concerned her
born of the same father and the same mother brother, (the product of criminal desire and criminal Here it is the issue of knowledge).28 the women and men molding the poisonous drinking knowledge with silences of the women their words. Truth does not need here as Lacan would a the envelope of beauty have it, but rather renouncing silences heroic voice task, may weapon. violence tives of it as Tagore's Nikhil came to state There it.

It is often considered the task of historiography

that announce in the the zones of taboo. image of empowering to the voiceless. I have myself for when end we by using Even the becomes be that women

to break the

something to speak and to give found this a very complicated use such imagery as breaking the silence, we our capacity to "unearth" hidden facts as a recover idea that we should the narratives of when we realize found the that between such narra see the relation I have men about between pain and to it important in the and women further work between of

is even

cannot

problematic told unless we has of as be done labor a model

language think of work

a culture

evolved.

the division

of mourning could transforming

on which

in thinking

the relation

and the body. Following this manner pain, language, Wittgenstein, the puzzle of pain frees us from thinking of conceptualizing that statements cer about pain are in the nature of questions about Instead, we pain or that of others. for acknowledgment and recogni begin to think of pain as asking not is denial of the other's about the of the tion; pain failings intellect but the failings of the spirit. In the register of the imagi tainty in language in the body. It is not that there is a seamless between the distant continuity shore and the everyday the registers of the imagi shore, between the subtle transfor nary and the real, but one can only understand if one mations from one shore to the other, that go on as we move nary, the pain but also seeks of the other only asks a home keeps in mind the complex relation between speaking and hearing, not for a home or doubt over our own

between building aworld that the living can inhabit with their loss and building aworld inwhich the dead can find a home. Itworries
me that I have been unable to name that which died when autono

Transactions
mous name citizens it, such of India were

in the Construction
simultaneously touched radical born

of Pain
as monsters.

89
But

then I have to remind myself and others that those who

as Manto, loss themselves of the madness of dream

tried to
in

and died

for the fierce regret transforming as in the political found those who India, while easily, speech con women on abducted in the Constituent debates Assembly, the violence honor when with tinue to talk about national dealing that women Partition. have had to endure in every communal riot since the

ENDNOTES Tn thinking through some of the issues raised in this paper, Iwas greatly helped by an idyllic three day retreat at Kasauli. I thank Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram
for their warm hospitality though, and Iwould the marvelous never have conversations. had the courage Kumar to write. Shahani

helped with some of the most difficult passages for which

Without Sanmay,

I offer my gratitude.

2G.D. Khosla, Stern Reckoning lished in 1951), 3.

3Veena Das, "Composition of

(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989; first pub

the Personal Voice: Violence and Migration," Stud

ies inHistory 7(1) (1991): 65-77; and Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthro pological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995).
4Stanley Cavell, Philosophical Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell,

5See especially Veena Das

1995).
Nandy, "Violence, Victimhood and the Lan

and Ashis

guage of Silence," in The Word and the World: Fantasy, Symbol and Record (Delhi: Sage Publications, 1986); Das, "Composition of the Personal Voice";
and Das, India. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary

6See Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cam bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994) and Stanley Cavell, "Philosophy andModernity: The Case ofWittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations,'" paper presented to the seminar on Modernity Reconsidered at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Study in the Social Sciences, 26-29 April 1994. Cavell, elsewhere, describes the later thought ofWittgenstein as ".. .providing a theory of the drive to metaphysics and the possibility and necessity of skepticism?as much a phi losophy of metaphysics as it is a philosophy of the ordinary." Cavell, Philosophi
cal Passages: Wittgenstein, Emerson, Austin, Derrida, 78.

7In the felicitous expression of Robert R. Desjerlais, Body and Emotion (Philadel phia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), grief is transformed into pain that clings to the body.

90
writer,

Veena Das
the Urdu
in our used to refer to the atrocities on women. "Did the English whisper

8Ihave to refer back to the haunting images that Khwja Ahmad Abbas,

ears that you may chop off the head of whichever Hindu you find, or that you must plunge a knife in the stomach of whichever Muslim you find? Did the En
glish also educate us into the art of committing atrocities with women of other

religions right in the marketplace? Did they teach us to tattoo Pakistan and Jai Hind on the breasts and secret organs of women?" Khwja Ahmed Abbas,
"Prastavna," in Ramananda on Contemporary Sagar, India, Aur 184. The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, insan mar gaya (Delhi: Rakjamal

Prakashan, 1977, inHindi).

Perspective 9Lawrence Conn.:

See also Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological

Testimonies: Holocaust Langer, Yale University 1991). Press,

10C.Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). 11 On the concept of pawning of voice, see Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy. 12LudwigWittgenstein, 1958).
missed

The Blue and Brown Books

(London: Basil Blackwell, is intended. This point was given a different life by

13If Sandip sounds like a textbook, this is precisely what

completely by the many critics of Tagore.

14A11these adjectives describe

Bankimchandra to describe

the goddess
the nation.

and were

15It would be obvious that my interpretation of this text differs considerably from the interpretation offered by Ashis Nandy, The Illegitimacy of Nationalism (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), who argues that Tagore's women stand
which for an authentic, the culture that relation on offering unencumbered puts up is modeled him relation to tradition and hence are the defense to both in response and an illegitimate colonialism on the colonial has a more image. Clearly Tagore sense of defeat when as evident to tradition inNikhil's Bimala her worship. Similarly, I cannot a derived on agree discourse. translated by with Partha

nationalism complex insists

Chatterji, Nationalism:
Press, 16This 1990), story that Tagore's is included

A Derivative
nationalism anthology are many in an

Discourse?
is simply of stories

(Delhi: Oxford
the Partition the

University

Alok Bhalla, ed., Stories about the Partition of India, vols. I, II, III (Delhi: Indus
Publications, 1994), but there problems with translation as I have

pointed out elsewhere. See Veena Das, Review of Stories about the Partition of India, vols. I, II, and III, ed. Alok Bhalla (Delhi: Indus Publications, 1994). 17Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. See my account of the narration by a man on how he had felt compelled to kill
his 18Nadia favorite C. sister because The the other Last modes of dying were too painful and Divination for her. in Inner Serematakis, Word: Women, Death

Mani
Women's

University of Chicago Press, 1991), 101. (Chicago, 111.:

L. Briggs, Wailing: "Personal Music Sentiments and Poetics Ritual Voices and Polyphonic in a Collective Discourse," in Warao Ameri

19See also Charles

can Anthropologist

95 (4) (1993): 929-57.

Transactions

in the Construction

of Pain

91

20VeenaDas, "TheWork of Mourning: Death in a Punjabi Family," inMerry I. White and Susan Pollock, eds., The Cultural Transition: Human Experience and Social Transformation in the Third World (London: Routledge, 1986), 179 210.
21Loring the Danforth, theoretical The frames Death used Rituals of Rural Greece and (Princeton, See N.J.: Princeton

University Press, 1982). This is not to suggest any underlying similarity between
by Danforth Serematakis. also Margaret

Allexiou, "Reappropriating Greek Sacrifice," journal ofModern Greek Studies 8 (1990): 97-123.
22For a detailed caste and 5. "Composition of the Personal Voice." discussion kinship of the structure are utilized, of these rituals and the manner Structure and in which Cogni categories see Veena Das,

tion: Aspects of Hindu Caste and Ritual (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1977),
chap. 23Das,

24Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
25Ibid., 64. and Das, India. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective

"Prastavna"; 26Abbas, on Contemporary

27Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological

Uruashi Menon Experience ery, Rupture, Butalia, and Kamla "Community, Bhasin, State

Perspective on Contemporary
On Women's Some Agency

India;
during

and Gender: Violence:

Partition,"

Economic
of Partition," Resistance.

and Political Weekly

"Surviving paper Indian presented State

17 (1993): WS12-WS24;
Reflections of the Indian

Ritu
Asso

on Women's

at IV Conference and Abduction

ciation ofWomen

Studies, 1990; and Ritu Menon

and Kamla Bhasin, "Recov

of Women during Parti

tion," Economic and Political Weekly

28J. Lacan, Lacan, "The Book Essence VII,

17 (1993):WS2-WS12.

in J. A. Miller, of Tragedy," ed., The Seminar of Jacques trans. Dennis Porter Norton &c Co, (London: 1992).